Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: quaint.

ONE Book Promo aka: why aren’t you slackers writing and promoting?

Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com.  One book per author per week. Amazon links only.

Pam Uphoff: Last Merge.

Thirty-fourth book in the Wine of the Gods series.

Xen and friends are trying to prevent a cross-dimensional disaster that could kill billions.

Eldon is getting tired of gold mining and really misses being on a world where he can just drink beer and watch football.

It’s going to take both of them to save the Empire of the One from the Helios Cannibals.

As you guys know — or not, though those of you who read the Dyce Dare series probably know — I have a very odd sense of humor.

Sure, it overlays other people’s sense of humor to an extent, or Dyce’s series wouldn’t make me so much.  But mostly it’s off on its own little island, dancing around and mooning bewildered passerbyes.

It will help you understand my sense of humor if you realize I almost died when older son started doing an history of the “lost seven states” of America, starting with the great state of Nwadna who moved to Italy, in embarrassment over the civil war.  It now lives in a third floor walkup, with a window box, and takes in wash to make ends meet.

I know for most people that’s too weird to be funny, because I tried it on you guys once and you were worried for my sanity.  But for me, the out-there nature of the insanity made me laugh until I couldn’t breathe.  (And yes, older son knows how to get to my funny bone.  It amuses him.)

So of course, when this hit my newsfeed This Student Failed Her Assignment Because Her Professor Said “Australia Isn’t A Country”it was all but guaranteed that I’d have to do a post about why there is no Australia.

Note that this was not the Professor’s contention.  Apparently her madness was of a lesser and distinctly unfunny degree.

From the post:

But the professor still wasn’t convinced. In her lecturing reply, which Arnold provided to BuzzFeed News, the professor doubled down on her Australia-denialism:

I will gladly re-examine your week 2 milestone project report.

But before I do I want you to understand that any error in a project can invalidate the entire research project.

Research is like dominoes, if you accidentally knock over one piece the entire set will also fall.

Australia is a continent; it is not a country. That error made it nearly impossible for you to accurately complete your week 2 research outline correctly.

As I mentioned above I will look over your week two paper once again and see if you earned more credits than I gave you.

The problem with the kind of insight the professor demonstrated is, of course, that like lifting the corner of the veil, it gives us a tantalizing glimpse that makes us want to see under it altogether.

And in this case, the problem is that it started me thinking.

Think about it, a continent where everything wants to kill you, and which nonetheless has inhabitants?  What sense does that make?  Oh, and their best known animal is a photogenic giant rat who is …. a marsupial?  And can box?  Right.  And people who live there are like uninhibited Britishers who continuously brag about their big knives?  Yeah, that’s likely.  Couldn’t they at least have chosen the French?  I mean, they’re more likely to brag about their phallic objects.

You’ll say, but Sarah, surely you have friends from Australia or who immigrated to Australia and naturalized.

Sure.  But I wasn’t there to see them grow up in Australia, was I?  Or there to see them live in Australia now?

I’m not sure where Kate Paulk actually grew up, though given her sense of humor is even odder than mine, perhaps a Mars colony they just never told us about.

And Dave Freer has clearly found a little piece of Eden and since he doesn’t want us all to tramp in and destroy it, he pretends he’s in Australia, which is a creation of novelists and movie makers and never existed.  Heck, the kangaroo (And what name is that?) was probably made up by Disney in the same spirit they “filmed” the “suicide” of the lemmings.

Seriously, think through the series of improbabilities that is Australia, and the answer will be plain to you.  Like the great state of Nwadna and its disappearance, the fact Australia is an hoax is one of those things that them who control history have tried to hide from you.

But that’s okay.  Your eyes have been opened, and your tinfoil hat set at a jaunty angle.

#thereisnoaustralia #wakeuppeople  #educateyourself

Yesterday I almost linked this post at instapundit.  I didn’t, not because there’s anything wrong with the post, but because the writer who is a friend went just a little too far.  He went just a little too far in a way that particularly irks me: that of ascribing something transitory and of the time to #yesallwomen.  And yes, I’m aware he exempted me by name in his post and other women by implication.  But that’s not the point.

As I keep telling the author, he’s a very bright man, and in general a good thinker, but he’s young.  So he’s very much a creature of his times, and some of the attitudes he has and the conclusions he takes are captive of their time, and if he were a little older or younger, he would have a different view.  (This starts with the name of his blog.  Only a very limited view allows you to see the West declining.  We’ve done that before, and we recovered, and unless I’m very wrong, the declining started 100 years ago and we’re now on the great rebuilding, the great re-learning.  Yeah, sure, it’s just the first stirrings, and you and I won’t see the West fully resurgent again, but our grandkids have a good chance to.  So I laugh at it and make duck noises.  He’s a good sport about it.)

In the same way he’s a creature of his place.  So he views #yesallwomen as American women of the late 20th century, who are, sorry, creatures different from most women throughout most of the history of humanity.

Oh, I’m not saying that “gender” is a social construction.  I spent the week with two toddlers, one male, one female (practice grandchildren) who are being raised, for various reasons, in a VERY non-traditional situation.  And yet you look at them, and yep, even if you put the boy in a dress, you’d know which one is the girl and which is the boy.  Their way of showing they’re tired, their preferred mode of play, even their way to obtain something are all exactly what you’d expect of their sex.  (The little girl is also obsessed with pink, which is funny.  Maybe that’s chromosome coded?  As Pratchett put it, if built by a little girl, it will be pink.  Now, I was never fond of pink, favorite colors were yellow, then red.  But you know, exceptions and statistics are neither of them the only valid way to reason.)  There are plenty of reasons for our brains to function differently according to the sex-hormones infused into us from gestation onward.  That’s because it makes our brains different in structure and operation.  And yeah, some of us are for various and probably gestation-hormones (you try to get a straight medical history out of my mom!) less stereotypical female.  But hell, even I have no sense of direction, can’t imagine in three dimensions, and frankly plot from the character out.  Other women are EVEN LESS stereotypical female and can reason visually in three dimension, can find their way blindfolded through the Minotaur’s labyrinth, and plot from “what happens” out.  The fact that statistically those are male characteristics doesn’t mean no woman can do it, and the fact that statistically most women can’t find their way out of a wet paperbag, can’t do visual stuff in their heads, and have novels full of long meaningful conversations signifying nothing doesn’t invalidate the exceptions.  That’s not how statistical distribution works.)

So, sure, male and female brains are different.  But the differences that my young friend pointed out are culturally coded.  There is no reason that women would be more averse to exploration, less interested in space, or more interested in using the government as a sort of super-daddy.

In fact, judging from ancestresses, in a country of immigrants, and from correspondence I got to see, I can tell you women were often the ones going “Let’s try x y or z country.  Let’s lift up and travel with nothing and no guarantees, because it might be a better life for my kids.”

In my own family, my mom is the one always willing to try the next thing, and dad is the one who would rather stay put, with his network of connections, his professional credentials, etc.

And I was born where I didn’t belong and went in search of my homeland.

But yeah, okay, we could be exceptions.  Except that… back at the time of the moon shots, my little friends, in an all girl school, were as excited as I was.

Sure.  Sure.  Mom — who is the least distributionist of my parents, will use that “Why do x when we could use the money to do so much good” thing.  I’ve heard it verbatim.  But do you know what she uses it for?  To justify not having pets.  The truth is mom doesn’t like animals (while dad does) and hates anything like cats that she can’t control.  So instead she dresses her hatred of animals (not socially acceptable) in a pious “We can do charity with that money.” (Much more socially acceptable.)  Keep that in mind as we go forward.

I’m going to ask you to engage in a thought experiment.  Imagine that for whatever reason, our state decided to combat discrimination against redheads.

Redheads are historically a discriminated-against group.  In Europe children who were red-headed were often assumed to have the devil in them.  They were often ill treated and one suspects in early times either killed or neglected/beaten to the point it amounted to the same.  They were, at least according to some crazy legends, the children of Lilith, and so not exactly of the same seed of Adam and Eve as the rest of us.  (The rest of us notionally.  Back when my hair had color it was a dark mahogany brown that turned dark red in the sun.  Guys engaging in the lean-against-the-wall-and-call-out-to-girls Portuguese male national past time would yell out “Oh Ruiva” to me, and ruiva in Portuguese means redhead — in Spanish the equivalent means blond.)

There were euphemisms for the hair color: ginger, foxy, strawberry blond.  But all those eventually became tainted because of what they referred to.

Let’s suppose that when our government started to expand into social engineering, they decided redheads were traditionally discriminated against, and thus must be protected against discrimination.  There would be mandatory (proportional to population) numbers of redheads hired.  There would be a prohibition de facto if not de jure against using terms like “ginger” because using them would be “racist” and you’d find yourself ostracised and unemployed.

These would be the least harmful of the provisions.  Yes, I did say least harmful.

The most harmful would be that little redheads would be told in words and more importantly in deeds, from a very early age that they’re a class set apart and that something is not quite right with them.  I mean, if everything were right with them, why would people need to be restrained, by law, from mistreating them?  Obviously there’s something inherently annoying/hateful about them which caused all the historical discrimination and that discrimination is ONLY not happening today because the powerful government stands between them and their would-be abusers.

Now, little redheads would, of course, know there was nothing wrong with them as humans.  They’d look into themselves and know they were no better or worse than other people.  So they were the victims of injustice and only the government kept them safe.

You’d find that redheads under that regime were some of the most in American terms “progressive” people around, always ready to throw in with the government against the individual and always ready to attribute anything bad in their lives to “oppression.”

They would be an interest class, interested in redistribution (surely there’s still some discrimination going on where the government can’t see, and they don’t have everything that’s due them) and strict enforcement of the preferential rules applying to them.  They would also see discrimination in every look, every sneer, every use of the word “red” around them and other micro aggressions.

Now in our world this wasn’t done to redheads.  But if there are parallel worlds, this wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility.  They were after all very badly treated, historically.

We do however have various groups that were treated this way, considered historically oppressed and set aside by government as protected classes.  This by the way is all according to Gramsci’s neo-Marxist theory.  (Marx expected the proletarian to “rise up” and be the instrument of communist revolution, but by Gramsci’s time it was obvious the proletariat was rising indeed, not in revolution, but to middle class.  So a new theory of “oppressed classes” was needed and Gramsci came up with the oppressed classes as the third world, basically.  And yes, he’s the twatwaffle you have to thank — ultimately — for the stupid “white privilege” theory.)

Our government, in many ways is has created a Gramscian society, by trying to protect people from “discrimination” (visible and invisible, in thought, word, deed, in what we’ve done and have failed to do.)

It is de-facto impossible to protect people from ALL discrimination.  All humans discriminate, and often on stupid things.  I, for instance, hate all willowy blondes on sight.  Most of them I’ve known have proven despicable human beings.

And yet, my best friend from childhood fell under that classification (for a Portuguese idea of blond) and I’ve been friends with many of them.  It just means I recoil on meeting them, but I’m open to being proven wrong.  Now of course, that means if I were hiring, willowy blonds would start at a disadvantage.

Sure, the government could protect willowy blondes against my heinous discrimination, but here’s the thing, I’m one of 300 million, and everyone else has things they discriminate against.

Even if race is a more widespread form of discrimination, it’s not the only one, and protection against it will be imperfect, and MUCH WORSE will feel the protected people think there’s something wrong with them or at least with the way they present, and wish protection forever.  Regardless of whether there’s any reason to expect discrimination or not.

But then the US government (and most governments of the civilized world, in imitation of the US as usual) decided to make #yeseverywoman a protected class.  Yep, we, women, who stand at 51% of the population, became a “minority” for purposes of hiring, firing, protecting against offense, etc.  (And more injurious things like divorce and child custody laws, even.)

But Sarah, you say, women have traditionally been discriminated against.  Yeah and?  So have redheads.  Is there a reason to enshrine that in legislation that perpetuates both discrimination and self-loathing and dependency?

I don’t think so, and last I checked (just looked again) I am a woman.

I also believe most of the reasons women have been discriminated against IN BUSINESS historically have been valid.  As have been the reasons to keep most women subordinate and in the house.

Listen, dummy, before contraceptives and the ability to do genetic tests, there were good reasons women under-performed men, and why most men would want to keep women confined and under strict rules.

Kids are the future.  Men can’t have them.  Women can.  And historically, women couldn’t AVOID having them.  And men had no way of knowing if the kid was his (part of the discrimination against redheads is because redheads are a recessive gene and can show up unannounced in a dark haired family, thereby leading to suspect the mother of infidelity.  Hence “redheaded stepchild.”)  Part of the civilizational contract, due to how difficult and expensive humans are to bring to adulthood is that men provide for the woman and their offspring.  BUT of course that means the men had to make sure the offspring was theirs.  Which meant social restrictions and a subordinate state for women.

Yeah sure, the guys should just have trusted their women.  Because, what? You’re willing to stand by #allwomen in the matter of fidelity?  If you are, you have some issues we should talk about. Like illusions of omnipotence.  Or raging sexism that considers women less/more than human.

Those historical reasons no longer apply, and as women started pouring into the workforce, those “anti discrimination” laws were no longer necessary.

(But Sarah, some guys really consider women less capable.  Yes.  Possess your soul in patience, we’ll get to that.)

Sure, women still generally make less than men, but that’s because of those brain differences.  Women, individually, prefer different kinds of work.  My son’s starting engineering class was 80% female, and no wonder, considering his engineering club in high school had 8 publications for “women engineers” and none for male.  He’s now in his final year in one specialty and the year before last in the other, and guess what?  It’s all male.  I mean all.  (What part of this is because idiots who tried to encourage the little girls NEVER gave them bad grades in STEM or told them they had to study harder which left young women maleducated, I leave to your judgement.  It’s another of those watchmacallit, unintended consequences of intervention.)  Even those women who excelled at engineering decided they didn’t like it and went instead into business or art.  (Yes, younger son IS disgruntled.)

And the truth is the more abundant “soft sciences” and “arts” pay — because more people qualified — less than hard STEM professions.  DUH.  When you separate avocations by what they actually do for work, the difference between male and female pay disappears, or female are slightly higher.

There is also, alas, social style.  My career has suffered from a very female issue: I’m less assertive than my male colleagues.  I know I am, but it’s such a back-brain thing, it’s hard to overcome.

Anyway, my belief is that we should do away with ALL protected classes, race and gender both.  Yeah, sure, there will be jerks who discriminate against you.  But there will be jerks (hi, y’all) who discriminate against willowy blondes, too.  THERE IS NO WAY TO PREVENT DISCRIMINATION.

Besides in the long run, the free market takes care of discrimination.  The jerk who won’t hire or serve willowy blonds will lose their work and business to the jerk who preferentially hires them.  If they’re a big enough demographic in the area, the first jerk goes out of business.  As for the willowy blondes, they can leave a job where they’re discriminated against and find one where they aren’t.

I walked out of a job when I found the boss was discriminating against me for being Latin (he thought I was Mexican, but that’s something else.  Also, stupid and ignorant.) I found a better one, paying twice as much, where the store was much better run, too.  I’ve walked off other jobs for the same reason.  It never meant being unemployed forever.

There is no UNIVERSAL discrimination.  And if you think there is, you ought to get out more, and take Gramsci off repeat on your ipod.

And the creation of “protected classes” by law has too high a price.

Are women raised in the late 20th century and early 21st in the US in general “progressive” and in love with daddy government?

Well, how not?  They believe everyone would mistreat them and discriminate against them, if government didn’t protect them.  They believe this, despite the fact that men in their lives are (like #yesallmen) by and large decent and fair, because they’ve been told from earliest age how hated/discriminated against they are.

And they’ve seen evidence, too.  If they weren’t hateful, why would there be a whole apparatus against discriminating against them?  And look how men are so mad at that apparatus (of course they are.  It amounts to discrimination AGAINST THEM, but never mind) it means they want to hate and beat on women!

Hence, “no space exploration we need that money.” “Daddy government, look, they’re taking stuff they stole from us and playing at space shots!”

This is transitory.  It has to be, because a species divided against itself cannot stand.  I just wish the failure mode of this insanity not to be a return to outmoded female oppression, ala Islam.  Our science if better now.  There is no reason to keep women under sofa covers, ignorant, and confined to the house.

However, right now, the future is looking uncommonly burka-y, because of the way women have been trained to behave and the horrible consequences to society.

Me?  I want a world where men and women are equal under the law.  Sure, same pay for same work (the free market enforces that anyway, more or less.)  Sure, equal legal rights in marriage.

Other than that, let people sort themselves out, and stop breaking them into protected and aggressor, privileged and mistreated.  It doesn’t do anyone any good, and does much harm.

Let individuals be individuals and you’ll be amazed how soon the Marxist shackles are thrown off.

It’s impossible to enslave a free individual. The most you can do is kill him/her.  But shackles on their minds and convince them that they need protection forever, and not only are they slaves, but they’ll help enslave others.

Don’t let them.  Teach your children well.  Reason yourself out of fear.  Work, live, do well.  The statists can’t control you then.

 

 

 

Lenin-hulk Smash and Grab Power- On The State And Revolution Part 3– by Amanda S. Green

Last night, I commented that reading Lenin in English seemed to be more difficult than it had when I first read it in Russian. Whether that’s the case or not, one thing is clear, Lenin was a master of stating a premise, cherry-picking supporting quotes from foundation documents and then convincing people only he and his followers were the true believers and guardians of socialism.

Unlike my previous posts (which you can find here and here), I’ve going to cover several chapters today. The reason is simple. Lenin was a lawyer and these chapters are prime examples of how he states the same principles and comes to the same conclusions. The only real difference is one chapter is based on quotes from Marx and the other on quotes from Engels. In fact, it would be easy to say it all boils down to this: the bourgeois state must be violently overthrown. The proletariat state will follow and it will gradually erode but it will be slow and the new state will put the boot heel on the necks of everyone who doesn’t comply until that erosion is complete and we have a true socialist commune at some undetermined time in the future.

Riiight.

The problem with leaving it that way is we miss the nuances of what Lenin advocated. More importantly, we miss the nuances of what members of our own government – not to mention those who want to be members of the government – have been trying to implement here. Do not be fooled by the fact they are trying to work within the confines of our Constitution (or find ways around it). They are determined to change our government and our way of life here in the U.S. Oh, they might think they are doing the “right” thing, but that is because they have fallen for the utopian bullshit so many do who think socialism is the only way for us to survive.

On to Lenin.

It is interesting, and perhaps a bit reassuring, to note Lenin’s comments about those he felt did not understand nor embrace what he saw as the true meaning of Marx’s comments about the overthrow of the state. Those people, he felt, had distorted Marx’s views by believing in a slow development of the socialist state instead of the overthrowing of the state. “In fact, the exact opposite is the case. Marx’s notion is that the working class must break up, smash the ‘ready-made state machine’, and not confine itself merely to seizing hold of it.” (TSAR pg 34) So far, we haven’t seen that in the U.S. However, don’t fool yourself. That time is coming if we don’t start recognizing the signs and take a stand. That is especially true now, when the liberals are so deep in Trump Derangement Syndrome that the very mention of a military parade can send them into apoplexy. It is true when you have experts of media manipulation like Donny Deutsch calling for people to take to the streets to start a revolution. So it is more important than ever that we know what their handbook says and understand it even better than they do. That is the only way for us to anticipate their next move and counter it.

“These words, ‘to smash the bureaucratic– military state machine’, concisely express Marxism’s principal lesson on the tasks of the proletariat in the revolution in relation to the state.” (TSAR, pg 34) To smash. Not to change. Not to evolve. Not to reform. To smash and, by inference, to destroy.

“[P]articular attention is due to Marx’s extremely profound remark that the destruction of the bureaucratic– military state machine is ‘the prerequisite for every true people’s revolution’.” (TSAR, pg 35) Here is where we need to start really paying attention. The smashing of the bureaucratic-military state machine is just the first step. What comes next is what those who spout the joys of socialism forget. Worse, those who haven’t forgotten it simply ignore or wave off the failures of the Soviet Union and other socialist/communist nations as having fallen from the one true way.

When discussing 1871 Europe, Lenin wrote:

A ‘people’s’ revolution tugging the majority along into the movement, could be such only if it embraced both the proletariat and the peasantry. These two classes then constituted the ‘people’. These two classes are united by the fact that the ‘bureaucratic– military state machine’ oppresses, crushes, exploits them. To smash this machine and break it up is truly in the interest of the ‘people’, of the majority, of the workers and the majority of the peasants: this is ‘the preliminary condition’ for a free union between the poorest peasants and the proletarians; and democracy in the absence of such a union is unstable and socialist transformation impossible. (TSAR pg 36)

Compare the above with some of the rhetoric we heard coming out of the Clinton or Sanders camps during the 2016 campaign season. Compare it with what we have heard from the more vocal BLM activists. Compare it with the fear-mongering we hear from the MSM. They might not say precisely to rise up and take to the streets in open revolution but that is the sub-texts.

So what do the “true” followers of Marx and, therefore, of Lenin want to follow the overthrow of the “state”? “[T]his machine was to be replaced by ‘the organization of the proletariat into the ruling class’, by ‘the conquest of democracy’.” (TSAR pg 37) In other words, one ruling class is being replaced by another. Yes, that’s been said before by the foundation documents and by Lenin. It will be said many more times. Lenin was, if nothing else, astute and understood people needed to see, read, hear something said more than once to remember it. He also knew if you said it often enough and with enough fervor and by hitting on what the basic concerns of his audience was, he could manipulate them to his point of view. It wasn’t any different from what the world would see approximately 20 years later with Adolph Hitler and how he could whip up the German peoples.

Lenin turns the discussion back to the Paris Commune.

Thus the Commune appears to have replaced the smashed state machine ‘only’ by fuller democracy: the abolition of the standing army; the provision that all officials should be elected and subject to recall. But as a matter of fact this ‘only’ signifies a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other institutions of an essentially different kind . . . It is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and its resistance . . . But the organ of suppression is now the majority of the population, and not a minority as always occurred under slavery, serfdom and wage slavery. And as soon as it is the majority of the people itself which suppresses its oppressors, a ‘special force’ for suppression is no longer necessary! In this sense the state begins to wither away. (TSAR, pp 38-39)

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve studied history and I’ve yet to see the evolution of a so-called socialist state to one where no “special force for suppression” is no longer necessary. In Russia, they’ve had 100 years to “suppress the bourgeoisie and its resistance”. If the socialist plan really worked, wouldn’t the proletariat majority be strong enough by now to do away with the “special force”? Sure, they might want to keep a standing army of volunteers to protect the state against invasion, but they shouldn’t need a police force or other means of suppression by now, should they? Hell, shouldn’t we be seeing some sign of erosion into a true people’s commune by now? Or is the erosion so slow it moves at less than glacial speeds?

Somehow, I think those who followed Lenin missed this part of his missive as well: “Complete electivity of all officials without exception; their subjection to recall at any time . . . .” (TSAR pg 40) When is the last time we saw the senior leadership of Russia “recalled” without there being a putsch? Yet if we point this out to the Bernies of the world, they either say Russia isn’t a true socialist nation or they sidestep and focus only on social issues. What they refuse to admit, possibly even to themselves, is you can’t divorce the political from the social.

In every capitalist country where there is a peasantry (as in most capitalist countries), the vast majority of the peasants are oppressed by the government and yearn both for its overthrow and for ‘cheap’ government. This can be realized only by the proletariat; and in realizing it, the proletariat is simultaneously taking a step towards the socialist reconstruction of the state. (TSAR pp 40-41)

So, the “peasantry” isn’t capable of realizing the overthrow of the government and must be led by the proletariat. Tell me how this isn’t classism in its most basic?

The way out of parliamentarianism is not, of course, the elimination of representative institutions and electivity but the conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops into ‘working’ institutions . . . Parliaments are only places where chattering goes on with the special purpose of fooling the ‘common people’ . . . In the Soviets, the ‘socialist’ gentlemen-cum-ministers are duping credulous rustics with phrase-mongering and resolutions. (TSAR pg 42)

This is where we have to be careful. This is also very similar to the sentiment we saw arise in 2016, a sentiment the DNC and Clinton didn’t recognize or understand. Many voters felt there were too many talking heads in Washington and those talking heads had lost touch with the common people. They wanted someone who understood their needs and concerns. Trump and his team understood that and the electorate responded. That means the electorate will also respond to a liberal who says with sincerity, whether real or fake, what they want to hear. (Can anyone say “Obama”?)

There can be no talk of eradicating the bureaucracy at once, everywhere and completely. That is utopia. But to smash the old bureaucratic machine at once and to begin immediately to construct a new one that facilitates the gradual eradication of all bureaucracy: this is not utopia, this is the experience of the Commune, this is the direct, immediate task of the revolutionary proletariat. (TSAR, pg 44)

This is the trap laid first by Marx and Engels and then by Lenin. The carrot of smashing the status quo of a government is dangled before the discontented and the disenfranchised. But they aren’t allowed to look behind the curtain to see that nothing has really changed. All those clamoring for revolution have done is replace one so-called oppressive government with another, one that will be even more oppressive in order to hold onto power. Remember, despite the claims that everything will be placed in the hands of the people, that doesn’t happen until the “erosion”. There is still an army and police to repress the bourgeois and those who won’t accede to the new regime. So how is this better?

Lest we forget one of the main reasons for Lenin writing The State and Revolution, he reminds us with this quote: Certainly no opponents of the advice of Engels and Marx will be found among the Bolsheviks. (TSAR, pg 59) Then, as is his want, he goes on to show how others are not true proponents of their writings, either forgetting or perverting the meaning of true socialism.

What we have to remember is much of what the socialists today espouse are the feel-good issues: universal healthcare, free education, living wages, etc. On the surface, those are all great ideas and something most of us could get behind. It is only when we peel back the layers and start asking questions like, “How are they going to be paid for if we aren’t writing the check?” that things get sticky. Unfortunately, the “true believers” don’t ask those questions or don’t consider the consequences of saying the government will pay for it.

After all, who pays for the government? If we leave healthcare in the government’s hands, what happens when we have a shutdown? What happens if we get into a budget crunch and funds have to be cut for healthcare? I know the answer and so do you but the true believers refuse to admit it. They refuse to look at the waiting lists for treatment so many countries with socialized medicine have and the number of people who suffer complications or – worse – who die as a result.

It is up to us to ask those hard questions. It is up to us to demand answers, not just from the government but from those trying to ram these changes down our throats. The first step in doing so is to understand their political philosophy better than they do.

Until next week. Now I need to find something to drink and something to get Lenin, not to mention Marx and Engels, out of my head.

[For raising the tone of this blog — ATH is culture! — and helping me with the exposing of the roots of the current mess — in her case with more facts! — if you decide to  send the woman a drink–  And her Amazon author page is here -SAH]

 

 

Which means I’m doing fiction, not you know blog posts.  Though I need to do some posts-for-money today, and have…. six topics on the board I use to keep track of such.  That will probably happen later in day, though.

I have at least one guest post, but I was busy with the MGC workshop and now it’s late to put a guest post up.

Therefore…  My circles were talking about this, yesterday, including some of you in the comments, when I skimmed.

SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch wows space experts, heralds new era of exploration.

The new, larger rocket is designed to hoist supersize satellites as well as equipment to the moon, Mars or other far-flung points.

“This is a tremendous accomplishment by the SpaceX team and a great day for space exploration,” commented Explore Mars CEO Chris Carberry, in a statement. “With this launch and other heavy lift vehicles slated to be launched in the upcoming years, we are truly on the verge the golden age of space exploration.”

It sure has been a LONG time coming.  But exploration rarely goes linearly.  I had to study the story of the discoveries (natch) growing up, and it’s amazing even under absolute monarchies, the stutters, set backs, and abandonment for years of the dreams of exploration.

And yet, everything alive on Earth is a colonist species.  We will go because we have to.  And we’ll take the species of Earth with us to the stars.

There are worlds out there that will resound with the voices of our descendants.  We will live under the light of unknown suns, eventually.  Our progeny will inherit the stars.

Ad Astra!  Go team human.

 

Yesterday I was talking to Third-Son-By-Adoption (and before I (again) get jumped by a bunch of people on facebook when this post shares, he’s not my adopted son, he’s my son-by-adoption, a science fiction thing where you claim your close friends as family members.  He has parents (whom I like very much too) and claiming him as my son would impinge on their rights) late at night and I told him I haven’t been this angry since my young street-brawl days.  (I wore reinforced boots for a reason.)

Between 12 and sixteen, I took a saying by some commie (which was taught to us by our lefty teachers, because really, the left never seems to understand when they ARE in power) “A flea can’t stop a train, but it can give an itch to the conductor” as my motto, and engaged in hooliganism, sabotage and general … well, I aimed to misbehave and boy, oh, boy I did.

Except for one occasion when fate thrust me in front of machine guns and my reaction might or might not have determined the reaction of the crowd, my actions were small and might never have been illegal.  Or if they were — it was illegal to remove political posters, because you needed a license to put them up — it was more than flesh and blood could manage, when they plastered the city in posters maligning the Americans, that I wouldn’t find a way to tear them out.  (I’d back up to the poster, and remove it behind my back, then stuff the pieces in my very large purse.  Every night I’d come home and hand my mom the pieces to burn.)  Mostly it was “pranks to make my classmates and teachers look stupid, because they are.”  And there was street fighting.

All of this kept me from getting in real serious trouble, of the “setting people on fire” variety.

For that matter, my blog might be my safety valve.

As to why I’m more angry now than I’ve been since then, it’s rather the same thing and the same reasons.

Another friend — might have been a commenter here — the other day was classing people according to Pratchett characters and said “And you’re William DeWorde.”

I don’t think this person had any idea how close — for various reasons — that hit to the mark.

Despite being a fiction writer (fiction is consensual mutual lies, okay?) I despise seeing truth abused.  There has been so much of it in my life.  I’ve been told so many lies by people who were sure they were my moral betters, even while they knew they were lying to me.  And those lies were so poisonous.  Their lying interpretation of history and economics have filled 100 million graves at least (and as Colonel Kratman says, probably more.)

For people in power to speak power to truth, particularly when those people are leftists who are reversing victim and aggressor makes me INCANDESCENTLY angry.

I can take people lying.  Of course, I can take people lying.  I even understand the concept of social/polite lying and don’t get bent out of shape over it (yes, I DO want a medal.  Why?)

It’s when the lies are poisonous and you reverse power and powerless and victim and attacker that I become angry.  VERY VERY ANGRY.

So the memo… was not news, except for where it matched ideas that were so “crazy” they made even me uncomfortable.  And yet… it was true.  Yeah.  So.

I’m angrier than I’ve been in decades.  I don’t think I’m alone in this.

And Number Three Son By Adoption said “Remember you said revolutions occur when things are getting better?  Well, things are getting better.”

He’s right you know.  For the first time in years a lot of us have emotional space to be angry.  At the same time the left, the side formerly in control of all the mass everything from communications to entertainment, feels their power slipping away and are getting outright stupid.  Stupid people make mistakes, and not of the kind we shouldn’t interrupt them while said mistakes are being made.  I.e. as we used to say in the eighties “the bear is most dangerous while wounded.”

So — beware.  There’s quicksand ahead.  A revolution or armed conflict is still the worst case scenario.  Even we — particularly we — on the freedom side aren’t likely to like the result.  But it might also be very hard to avoid.

Keep your wits about you.  Beware of how your emotions cloud your judgement.  Do not retreat.  Do not apologize.  But don’t strike the first blow.

Sursum corda.  The odds are slim but there IS still a chance we get through this unscathed and emerge closer to the constitution.  And you know, maybe G-d isn’t tired of looking out for fools, drunkards and the United States of America.  Yet.

 

 

I haven’t talked about this before, because it’s hard to type when you’re stunned.

I love all the people who say that it doesn’t matter, that we all already knew this, that …

Guys, no.  We didn’t all already do this.  And if the dems all already knew this, they should make a pilgrimage, barefoot and in sack cloth to Nixon’s grave and beg his pardon, because what he did in bugging the opponent’s political offices didn’t include (Adding some stuff we’ve found the last year and a half):

-collusion and help from a sitting president.

-the concoction of a foreign attachment to the opponent to smear him and undermine his presidency.

-the use of our law enforcement agencies to spy on someone’s campaign.

-the leaking of entirely made up “salacious information” to the media, using people whose position should prevent their stooping that low.

-the use of the DOJ to exonerate someone who plainly and clearly broke the law, in a way that any American with security clearance would be in Levenworth for.

I can’t claim I didn’t know the Dems were dirty, and way dirtier than the Republicans.  I knew they were because it stands to reason.  Part of the reason I’ve always (but once) voted Republican, even for candidates that were in fact democrats like McCain was this precisely: the press will cover for dems but not for republicans.  So even if you assume at some point in the distant past they both got up to the same exact sheneningans, the republicans being constantly caught, or even accused of crazy stuff at random, means they’d watch themselves all the time and limit corruption, because they’d be afraid of getting caught.

The Dems on the other hand, could lead dissolute public and private lives with no fear.  And therefore they did.

But this…

Look, I’m not a political innocent.  Never had a chance to be.  As early as I started thinking about politics, it was during a revolution and … well… you see things very clearly then.

And coming here, I saw that the dems were using exact speeches I’d heard communists deliver the week before.  Note I’m not saying same talking points.  I’m saying same speeches, in another language.  Maybe that’s why Comey said that Trump gets his speeches from Russia.  Maybe they have, for years.  After all the left ALWAYS projects.

So this shouldn’t be a shock.

Except it is.  America means nothing if it doesn’t mean the rule of law applies equally to both sides.

Heinlein said — and was right — that when people stop believing in he rule of law, society is broken.

And maybe that’s why the media is pedaling so hard.  They think they can make us believe again and then everything will be fine.

They don’t get that part of what cost Hillary the presidency was that a lot of Americans have or had clearance and know the rules, and know what would happen to them if they did what she did, intent or no intent.  It wasn’t the crime, it was her being allowed to skate on this, that made people mad enough to vote against her.  Millions of people who otherwise would not have voted went to the polls.  But they don’t get that.  They think they can wave everything away because they have for years.

In a way it reminds me of publishing, where if you say something against a darling, they demand you apologize and — as we saw during SP — blare that we’ll never work in this town again.

They don’t seem to get that for most of us our careers aren’t artifacts of “my house pushed and helped me” but rather “I succeeded in the face of their despising me and hating me” and “granted only so far, but now I have indie, so this is my middle finger for you and all your compadres.”

They don’t get, either in the media, in the politics, or in publishing, that the gate is firmly locked, but the wall has fallen.

The wall has fallen — thank G-d almighty, the wall has fallen — and they hold NOTHING in their hands.

They also don’t seem to understand the only way to cleanse the body politico is to come down hard and fast on everyone who openly and clearly breaks the law and has broken the law.  It’s the only way to save any power, any structure, any traditional respect for the law.

This is a critical moment for the republic.  Things have been revealed that even I would think were borderline fever swamp three years ago.  And yet everyone is pretending everything is normal.

I’ve said before the book for our times is Puppet Masters.

They think they can carry on the masquerade forever.

Build under, build over, build around.

The rule of law not only hit the iceberg, but steerage is filling with water.

And yet in the salon of the would-be elite the music plays on and there’s a squabble over what type of fork to use to eat oysters.

 

Books Get Pimped

Hello, it’s Sunday and it’s time for the books of the horde to put on their high heels and mini skirts and strut their stuff up and down the blog page, and not come home again till they’ve made writers some money.  Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com.  One book per author per week. Amazon links only.

Nathan Bissonette, A Wizard in the Monastery

A weary wizard. A cloistered cleric. An enchanted manuscript. Will they save the world, or destroy it?

Laura Montgomery, Mercenary Calling.

Exoplanets. Terrorists. Lawyers…

Calvin Tondini has his first client, but he may be in over his head.

It’s the twenty-second century. Humanity’s first and only interstellar starship returns safely. Its mission to discover a habitable planet succeeded beyond all hopes, but there’s one problem. Captain Paolina Nigmatullin of the USS Aeneid left an unsanctioned human colony behind and now stands charged with mutiny.

Despite a somewhat spontaneous approach to his own career, life, and limb, Calvin intends to map a more cautious path for his new client. Captain Nigmatullin, however, shows an unnerving penchant for talk shows–appearing on them, that is–and otherwise ignoring her attorney’s sober counsel.

How can Calvin ensure his client’s freedom when death stalks the Aeneid‘s crew, and Nigmatullin herself hides secrets from everyone, even her lawyer?

Karen Meyers: The Chained Adept Bundle (Books 3-4): A Lost Wizard’s Tale.

Broken Devices – Book 3 of The Chained Adept

CHAINS WITHOUT WIZARDS AND A RISING COUNT OF THE DEAD.

The largest city in the world has just discovered its missing wizards. It seems the Kigali empire has ignited a panic that threatens internal ruin and the only chained wizard it knows that’s still alive is Penrys.

The living wizards and the dead are not her people, not unless she makes them so. All they have in common is a heavy chain and a dead past—the lives that were stolen from them are beyond recall.

What remains are unanswered questions about who made them this way. And why. And what Penrys plans to do to find out.

—

On a Crooked Track – Book 4 of The Chained Adept

SETTING A TRAP TO CATCH THE MAKERS OF CHAINED WIZARDS.

A clue has sent Penrys back to Ellech, the country where she first appeared four short years ago with her mind wiped, her body stripped, and her neck chained. It’s time to enlist the help of the Collegium of Wizards which sheltered her then.

Things don’t work out that way, and she finds herself retracing a dead scholar’s crooked track and setting herself up as a target to confirm her growing suspicions. But what happens to bait when the prey shows its teeth?

In this conclusion to the series, tracking old crimes brings new dangers, and a chance for redemption.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is:  private.

 

 

 

 

 

So, ladies, gentlemen and small squirrels, I’m here to assure you that I did not forget Dark Fate, though my idea is to take a stray week in February, write it to the end, and then put it up in great big chunks.  Um… Might be in March.

You see, I didn’t forget either Alien Curse OR A Well Inlaid Death (the next Dyce mystery, for which I have a cover and everything done by the amazingly talented Jack Wylder, see above.)  I’m just running about 3 weeks late on when I intended to release things, which I feel calls for some small explanation.

You see, late last year older son was diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea, which had probably been going on for three and a half years, judging by symptoms.  There is an unfortunate airways configuration in my husband’s family, so that men get this issue quite early, but you know, the thing about sleep apnea is that it’s a stealth issue, and you don’t notice and the person just thinks they’re depressed, or at least that was the case.  Also, since son didn’t snore as in AT ALL it never occurred to us he had an issue, since you usually can hear someone with apnea across the house.  (We used to joke when my father in law visited about sleeping as far away as possible.)

Anyway, we know Dan had it, he just for several reasons hadn’t treated it for about 10 years (long and complex story involving insurance and stuff) and he realized suddenly he was suffering severe problems and should go along with it.  Fine.  And then I thought, “Well, when it comes to dropping projects, etc, I’ve been having the same issues, including an inability to lose weight, and a massive issue with being able to concentrate on anything longer than an article.”

The doctor was doubtful (as he should be) on my needing a test, because it seemed to be (and was, to an extent) a case of “Well, since we’re at it.”

So I did the home sleep test and they found I was running oxygen in the low eighties most of the night.  This wasn’t actually a huge shock, since I was high eighties to low nineties during the day.  You see, I was born premature, and then I had a bunch of illnesses that left my lungs in screwed up shape.

So they scheduled a full sleep test.  I went to that sure they’d tell me all was normal and I wasn’t right in the head.  Um… turns out not so much.  Still down in the low eighties to sometimes high eighties for blood ox.

It’s not exactly the same issue as husband and son, since it seems to be mostly an insufficiency of oxygen.  But it’s solved more or less the same way.  I do apnea and probably have most of my adult life, but that can be fixed by an appliance that moves my lower jaw forward.  The problem is I’d still need an oxygen concentrator with that.  The other problem is that I found I had the exact same issue with the appliance as I had with the one my doctor made me years ago to prevent my grinding my teeth: I grind my teeth MORE on it  and more or less destroy my gums in the process.  OTOH just having an apap blowing an almighty jet of air into me both stops the apnea and the oxygen deficiency.

So I’ve been a week and a half on it.  I think this is called “The week of fighting the machine.”

It’s getting better, but last night one of the stupid straps that aren’t supposed to come loose came loose, and I was too sleepy to figure out what it was until 5 am.

ANYWAY there is a difference.  I resumed dreaming with just the dental appliance, which I’ve had for a couple of months (before that I was sleeping in two minute increments, so not so much.)  But the blowy air thingy has stopped the perenial congestion and in a week and a half is well on its way to clearing the chronic bronchitis. It makes me think of tons of things, since mom — she does snore.  Loud too.  Also has the symptom I was having, of getting maybe two seconds warning I needed a nap and falling asleep anywhere and everywhere — and her family all develop this chronic congestion and bronchitis starting at around 40.  I know I’ve been oxygen deficient at least that long.  The thing is if I’m oxygenated at night, I seem to remain so during the day.  Though it’s entirely possible not to say likely that in ten years or so I’ll need an oxygen concentrator during the day, at least while living at altitude.  (And yeah, on “why didn’t people get this stuff before?”  Well, they did.  I’m sure a sleep study on mom would be interesting.  My family has the charming habit of stopping sharing a bedroom when the kids move out.  Not because of not getting alone, but because of sudden onset, bizarrely loud snoring.  This tells you something.)

This is probably the cause of the demilienation events going on in my brain, and in six months or so I’ll ring up the neurologist and ask to check.  I haven’t had cases of my foot not obeying me, but that might be just coincidence, since a week and a half is not enough (probably) to recover from that, unless it was caused by sheer tiredness.

The other thing that seems to be clearing up is the incipient and permanent depression.  You guys have no idea how amusing it has been for years to be berated for being “too optimistic” when in fact my “optimism” was self administered therapy so I didn’t fall completely into the pit of despond.

There are indications that the brain is coming back on line, too.  I mean, the last two years since being treated for hypothyroidism, I have been markedly better, but not … up to my own standards.  And long works still required an enormous amount of will power.

Speaking of which, I want major props because while extremely sleep deprived and hypothyroidal, I still finished at least a novel a year and often more.  (And by the last two years have been better: well, I haven’t need to tape a list of character names to the monitor because I kept forgetting them or have the issue of forgetting where I’d left people in the last chapter.)

I am older, perhaps 5 or ten years since the problems set in, so I have no idea how far I’ll recover.

Anyway apparently one of the things that this oxygen thing and not breathing properly (Seriously, guys, how can I flunk breathing?  I’m special) has done is cause me to get sick a lot.  This January I caught what my son classified as a “Pseudo flu” (I mean, I couldn’t even have the real thing?) and was even more out than usual.  So I lost three weeks, a week of which I couldn’t even write for PJMedia, because I was out of it.

Things are better, even if last night was a mess.  And I hope they’ll get steadily better over the next few months, and that I can type in the novels I have long hand, and finish others, including but not limited to a couple of Dyce novels, and the sixth musketeer mystery.  (I might have waited too long on that and lost the fans, but it couldn’t be helped.  I wasn’t well.  I hope the sixth revives the series.  If not it will be the last.)

Lately too, I’ve stumbled on the half written 4th Shakespeare book (there were five planed in the series) but I hesitate on that, just because of the massive amount of research it will take to get back to that mode.  We’ll see.

Anyway, I should be writing.  Books, I mean.  Oh, and articles.  This weekend too I hope to finish typesetting the next short story collection and get it out next week.  There’s this velum program for typesetting I mean to try to put out paper editions of all the stuff that doesn’t have it.

I shall go.  More Grant in Portugal and other stuff next week, I promise.

 

I realized the other day that I was born the same distance from the end of World War II as we are now from 9/11.

It seems like a weird idea.  After all, 9/11 happened yesterday, just about.  I remember the shock, and worrying about Dan (he was working in DC at the time) and bringing out the bourbon and frying doughnuts.  I remember months of not being able to think straight.

But WWII was ancient history when I was born, a thing of the past done and over with.  It helps process things like the holocaust when you feel as though they happened in the unimaginably distant past.

Yeah I grew up watching WWII movies, which were all in black and white, and where the decisions seemed obvious and simple.  I grew up in the sixties, with the idea of hallucinogenic drugs if not the reality (sure they existed in Portugal.  Heck, they probably existed in my circles, but I turned 8 in 1970 and if those existed in the playground, it was more than I could guess) the idea of space travel and a bunch of truly bad ideas that were all about overturning centuries old practices and ideas with the new shiny of what boiled down to a few really dumb syllogisms (we’re all naked under our clothes, man) and a lot of also very old, never worked anywhere, and dressing them up in new psychology won’t help (free love, man.)

I literally did not realize how close I was born to WWII because it was old history to me.  Dead and gone.  The harrowing uncertainty of the past had become history, written, cut, dried, judged, finished.  I was so uninterested in it I never opened my dad’s multi volume history of WWII.

And thinking back, it’s no wonder I viewed it that way.  Sure, my parents remembered WWII, but they were kids then.  (And since Portugal, which was even more broke than usual, and also really couldn’t go in on any side except the Axis without prompting an invasion by its old enemy, Spain, [which btw tells you that Portugal, national socialist though it was, didn’t align with the Axis intellectually, because otherwise it would have gone in, easily enough.  These things are way more complicated than we tend to think.  I mean FDR was also largely national socialist.  It was the spirit of the time.] was neutral, my parents memories were mostly rationing, and that time that people came around to glue film on the windows, to minimize the risk in case of bombing.  And they didn’t even know what kind of political brinksmanship led to that, except that the bombing expected was German.]  My grandparents were the ones of age to have fought in WWII, had the country not been neutral.  My grandfather did tell a story about a trip from Brazil when his boat was boarded by a German submarine crew, looking for someone or something, and if I got the gist of the story right, they really had a (British or American) spy hiding among them, whom they didn’t turn in.  (Grandad spoke English, and also he really didn’t have a fiction-writer bone in his body.  He couldn’t have embellished any story to save his life.  That comes from his wife, the storyteller.)  But I don’t remember the details very well, because I was very young and most of the referents he was using made no sense to me.  There was a type of coat my mom wouldn’t let me wear, because it reminded her of the emaciated Jewish refugees arriving in the train stations in Portugal during and after the war.  Not that she was hostile to them, but as she put it, the coat made her think of “famine and desperation.”

Sure the rationing made the country very poor.  National socialism did too.  (And you know, Bernie might be truthful about his national socialism, though I’d doubt the national part of it, because I remember he honeymooned in the Soviet Union, the weasel.  His hatred of “corporations” matches the regime I grew up under, and mind you, that kept us d*mn poor.  Particularly the insistence on keeping out multinational trade.)  My mom was one of those children who walked along the train line, picking up bits of fallen coal to use to cook with at home.  Being older and Portuguese, she wasn’t one of the children John Ringo saw, but she was their spiritual sister.  And she and her siblings gleaned the fields, after the farmers were done, to get potatoes, to supplement the household food.  (And grapes, and whatever.)  My dad came from a more stable/better off family, though the country itself was so broke that his father worked abroad for 30 years of his life, to send money home to keep them so.  But when dad got a scholarship to high school (at the time a paying thing,) his mom made him a book bag out of old cloth, because they couldn’t afford to buy him the normal leather ones.

But all these hardships were far in the past when I was born.  It never occurred to me how close they were, or that my brother, himself, was born only 9 years after the end — and the horrors — of World War II.

I was a child of the cold war.  We grew up knowing we were all going to be blown up, at any minute, by a dispute in which neither us nor our rather tiny country had any say.  Always, from earliest understanding in the world, I ran through plans to survive nuclear war, because I knew this would come in my lifetime.  (Yeah, I do know it might still, but it’s different, isn’t it?)  I grew up jaundiced and cynical, looking at the “Soviet Life” magazines and snorting, and passing the Gulag Archipelago under the desk to classmates, because it wasn’t legally forbidden, but heaven help us if our teachers found out we were reading it.  Say goodbye to that A and be harangued forever about buying into propaganda.

I grew up knowing that all the intellectuals thought communism was cool, that leftism was a positional good, that being patriotic was gauche, and that, nuclear war or not, communism would eventually win out.  Even those who hated it believed so.  It was so efficient after all.  Inhuman, but efficient.

And then the Soviet Union fell, and the sheer inefficiency misery and stupid of the regime leaked out.

And yet I remember, in my thirties, after the fall of the wall, reading my first Reason magazine and realizing with a shock that overpopulation and pollution, let alone the exhaustion of natural fuels, were nowhere near as close as I’d been taught to believe, that the end of the world in my time or even my grandchildren’s time, wasn’t inevitable, that there was hope.  It was both a shock and a breath of fresh air.

Why am I bringing all this up?

We all grow up caught in the tidal wave of history, only the wave of made of amber.  It pins us in place.  We carry with us a set of beliefs, thoughts, feelings, that are completely transitory, but feel like they’ll last forever, like they are eternal verities.

I was born in the after-shock of World War II, which was itself, and aftershock of World War I.  I grew up suspicious of nationalism, because people were suspicious of nationalism after World War I.  I grew up with leftism being a positional good, because communist (mostly Soviet) propaganda during and after WWII made it so.  FDR let the soviets cast themselves as the alternative to fascism, when they were no such thing, all to secure the cooperation of good old uncle Joe.  Sometimes you make pacts with the devil.  I’m not sure that one was needed or worth it, but then I wasn’t there, and for all FDR was a bastard I don’t think he hated America.  We had to wait a while for presidents who did hate America. So he did what he thought he had to do, and I can’t judge it.

And the patina of leftism as a social good hasn’t worn off yet.  All our intellectuals think that it’s inevitable some form of socialism will win out.  Except that Europe is choking on socialism and dying, and if it saves itself it will by renouncing it.  (And no, I don’t know if that’s possible.)  And the poverty and misery of leftism keeps pouring out, every chance, leaking, guttering, seeping through, becoming obvious despite their domination of the media that does its best to keep all that hidden.  It’s becoming very obvious.

We’re on the crest of yet another wave of history, where it turns, and curls under.

Go easy on the millenials, particularly the young ones.  They were taught to believe in a senescent philosophy that never worked anywhere. They suffered the shock of 9/11 but no one at all helped them process it.  They were taught to hate their country by the people who think that removing nationalism will remove war (“nothing to kill or die for” — I’m spitting on you John Lennon.)  They are taught to hate corporations by people who are as economically naive as the national socialists I was born under.  And no one has taught them the horrors of communism, everywhere it was tired.

Well, we’re on the turning of the wave.  And part of it is the leftist boomers getting old/losing their grip on the institutions they so carefully crawled through.  And part of it is the new media, and unbelievably dirt, vast, unimaginable secrets leaking out.

The kids will be all right.  It’s only about 100 years since Europe tore itself apart psychologically and Western civ decided that the way to stop this was to destroy itself.  And we’re already turning away from that.  We’re rebuilding.

Grandma’s grandmother was born just after the Napoleonic wars.  A hundred years and change isn’t much in human history.  It is much for HUMANS because we’re caught in our little bit of amber, and only see so far.  But human history, human ideas move slower.  They do move, though.  No movement, no trend — particularly dysfunctional ones — lasts forever.  Things self-correct.  Maybe it’s too late for Europe.  And maybe not.  Sure, there’s a lot of Arabs around, but a lot of them converted and became part of the weave of Europe before.  It’s not the genes, it’s the culture.  It could still turn around.

In biographies of Englishmen who fought the peninsular wars, I read how devastated the country was, till there was not a work-cow to eat, till fields were ruined, great houses and families destroyed.  After it came a time of lawlessness and fear, the tall stone walls of the village topped by broken glass, in a more or less vain attempt to keep thieves at bay.  Grandma’s house was built around that time, and so designed there was only one window in the lower floor, and it had a huge board that went over it at night, to prevent break ins.

Yet I grew up in a poor country, but one in which food was plentiful and where walls were decorative, and maybe five feet high.  Now mom and dad have raised the walls, and have security bars on all the lower floor windows.  And steel shutters that shut the house tight at night.

No trend is forever.  There is nothing as stupid as extrapolating present trends to infinity.  And none of us is given to see more than a little bit of the great waves of human history that come from an unimaginable, not-remembered time and carry on to a future none of us will see.

When you’re inclined to despair, remember, most of us were born very soon after World War II, after the two conflicts that ripped Europe’s heart out and ate it.  We’re still in the shock wave, in the concussion.  Even our kids and grandkids will still be affected by that great explosion.

But nothing lasts forever.  Even the most grievously maleducated generation in the history of the west will have events that change their mind, discover ideas and secrets that transform all.

And our function is to snatch brands from the fire, to take these great grandchildren of World War II and the fall of Europe, and teach them that yeah, their history is not immaculate, their country not without flaw.

But in the long march of history, the United States might be the last great hope of mankind, and Europe itself, ragged and soaked in blood is no more so than other continents, other cultures, and is perhaps better in, for the first time, having raised a lot of people above the poverty line.

The flag of personal freedom will rise and fall, as will the idea.  But respect and freedom for the individual are the only thing we found that breaks, for at least a short time, the cycle of “bad luck” and evil that afflicts humanity.

Carry it proudly, and give copies to your children or to young people whom you can reach.

It’s a long, long road.  None of us will see the end of it.  Battle on.